[The limits of the doctor's duty in intensive medicine (author's transl)].

The technical possibilities of intensive care, bound up with hope and torment for those treated, call for limitation of the duties of the doctor at the point where the treatment becomes mere technical brilliance and utterly pointless for the survival or subsequent life of the patient. The doctor's problem is to know when a treatment is hopeless. The only way to find out is by therapeutic trial. If the expected success is not produced within a reasonable time, then, from the point of view of the proper understanding of medical duty, it must be stopped. An attempt is made to draw up a series of degrees of intensive therapy for practical purposes. The performance of such a graded therapy, which in the last analysis consists of the stage by stage disposal of maximum possibilities of treatment, demands the capacity to think, the courage of responsibility and a great wealth of psychological and human insight.